USD welcomes back military nurses

University puts spotlight on its many military nurses

LINDA VISTA  It is perhaps not surprising that about 20 percent of the 370 students at the University of San Diego’s Hahn School of Nursing and Health Science are either active duty military or veterans.

Certainly the concentration of military installations in the region is a factor. But the school’s military connections run deep.

“Irene Palmer was a captain in the Army,” Dean Sally Brosz Hardin said of the late Irene Sabelberg Palmer, the nursing school’s founding dean who came to campus in 1974 after leaving the Army and working at several other universities.

Hardin said there are no readily available statistics on how many active duty and veteran students attend nursing schools around the country, but she and others estimated that USD has one of the highest concentrations in the country after the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md.

“We’ve always had a substantial percentage of military and vets here,” Hardin said. “Many of them go on to be promoted to top officer positions.”

Despite its long history with the military, the nursing school will hold its first formal event honoring service members and veterans Thursday — one of several veterans events at area colleges and universities this week.

“Like it or not, nurses are always intimately related to war and its aftermath,” Hardin said. “It’s time for them to have their own special day.”

Many of the military and veteran students getting graduate nursing degrees at USD already have seen combat’s effects as registered nurses.

“In 2006, I was deployed to Balad Air Force Base in the Sunni Triangle in Iraq,” said Linda Stanley, a retired Air Force major who is pursuing a master’s degree in the psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner program. “In 2006, that was probably one of the worst places and worst times in Iraq … We saw mostly Marines and soldiers. We had head injuries, amputations, severe burns, gunshot wounds, lots of IEDs.

“We had 330 trauma admissions a month. I was there from January to May. I don’t think there was ever a night we didn’t have casualties. And we got mortared every day,” Stanley said.

“I thought I was doing fine. You see a young Marine die, you look at another nurse, maybe you want to start to cry, but you can’t go there when you have seven or eight more to take care of.”

It wasn’t until Stanley was sent next to command a clinic in Korea that she began suffering from insomnia, nightmares and feeling distant and numb — all symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder that she mostly chose to ignore for several years.

“I didn’t get help soon enough,” she said, but when she finally did seek it in 2009, “I dove into therapy.”

She retired from the Air Force in May 2010 and entered USD’s program.

Stanley, who still meets with a therapist for her own PTSD, now helps treat fellow sufferers at Camp Pendleton as part of her USD training, work she plans to continue when she earns her degree.

“They’re the same patients I had over in Iraq, but now they have these other wounds, invisible wounds,” she said. “I don’t want to see these guys waste their lives.”

Navy Lt. Cmdr. Ryan Nations is just starting his second year in the Ph.D. program at the nursing school after his education was interrupted last year by deployment to forward operating base Farah in western Afghanistan, where he worked as a nurse anesthetist and assistant officer in charge of the field surgical team.

Nations said his team saw relatively few U.S. wounded.

“We saw a lot of civilian casualties, a lot of Afghan National Army and Aghan police casualties,” he said.

Nations said his team never felt directly threatened by insurgents.

“But it was odd to wear a weapon all the time,” sometimes even in the operating room. That didn’t happen all the time, he said, but “we always had them close. We knew where they were.”

Nations works at the Naval Medical Center San Diego while attending USD, but hopes to win a Navy scholarship that would allow him to pursue his degree as a full-time student, a status known as duty under instruction.

Nations hopes to become a professor of nursing at the Uniformed Services University after getting his degree.

While Nations and Stanley will be among those attending USD’s invitation-only event today, one of those “top officer” alums mentioned by Dean Hardin will not be able to make it.

“USD is very attuned to military nurses,” said retired Rear Adm. Kathleen Martin, who earned dual master’s degrees in nursing administration and family health nursing from the university in 1992.

After getting those degrees, Martin held a series of commands before taking over command of what was then known as the National Naval Medical Center Bethesda.

Her next stop was deputy surgeon general, the second-highest medical position in the Navy, a position she held until retiring in 2005. She was the first woman and the first nurse to hold the job.

“My goal for my career at that time was not to be a flag officer,” Martin said. “I didn’t even think about it. I aspired to be the commanding officer of a military treatment facility. In order to get promoted past the rank of commander, you really had to have an advanced degree. It was essential to get me promoted, and it was of great value as I went on to other levels in leadership.

“I think so many military nurses go to USD because of their philosophy,” Martin continued. “We gain a lot from the university, and I think we contribute a lot to the university.”

Martin won’t be there, but Stanley, Nations and many others are expected to attend the nursing school’s event in their honor.